Product Innovation Pipeline

Reinforcing a category by creating new wireless landline concepts.

Our client, Intelbras, is a leading Brazilian company focused in security, telecommunications and network areas that exports its products for more than 15 countries. In 2011 they were facing an enormous challenge: the higher penetration of mobile phones in Brazil tightened the price gap of landlines calls versus mobile lines calls, which led to a decrease in the perceived value of landline phones, commoditizing the category. In that context, Intelbras’ industrial design team sought at INSITUM the help for repositioning their wireless landline phones in order to revitalize the category in Brazil.

Objectives

The goal was to understand market opportunities by identifying residential and corporate user’s unmet needs related to landline phones in order to define innovation strategies regarding Intelbras’ positioning. The innovation strategies would be translated into new product and feature concepts that would guide the industrial design team for the next years.

The higher penetration of mobile phones in Brazil tightened the price gap of landlines calls versus mobile lines calls, which led to a decrease in the perceived value of landline phones, commoditizing the category.

This project helped a lot other projects inside the company, and mainly to evolve our creative process of the industrial design department.

Diego Serra - Wireless Landline Manager

Approach

In order to better understand our client and its market we conducted a secondary research, defining also the main investigation areas for the project. From that, an extensive ethnographic research was conducted, helping the team to understand the main unmet residential and corporate user’s needs and use them as an inspiration on the development of new product and feature concepts with users in co-creation sessions. These concepts were then used as a basis for a new strategy and positioning definition for the wireless landline phone category.

Results

The resulting deliverable was a definition of the new strategy and innovation opportunity areas with design guidelines and product concepts for each one. Some products based on that strategy were launched in 2014 and 2015 and the project also helped Intelbras to improve its internal process related to research and product design.